One For Walrus: ワン・フォー・ウォールラス
by Dewyn
Summary: the sheer power of One For All turns Izuku into a walrus during the summer sports festival
1. walurusu: origin

**Chapter One: Walurusu: Origin**

 **please end me i can sink no lower as a writer**

* * *

" _Young Midoriya…you, too, can become a_ _hero_ _walrus."_

As it turned out, One For All had a nasty little secret. The Quirk hadn't quite been powerful enough for its previous wielders to have to undergo the kind of training Midoriya Izuku had had to, so when he received the Quirk from its strongest wielder to date – All Might, who alone was probably responsible for forty percent of its power – he'd been subject to a very unusual side effect that only manifested when breaking his limbs using one hundred percent of its power.

 _One For Walrus._

"A-ahh, Deku-kun, um…"

 _Call a scientist!_ he tried to scream, but of course he couldn't. Walruses cannot scream. He did, however, make a lovely-sounding grunt that brought to mind a dying lawn mower engine.

"Midoriya-kun! Is this your true form!?"

 _Yes, I am absolutely, totally naturally a walrus!_ he wanted to yell, but only succeeded in bumping a tusk (painfully) against the wall.

Inexplicably, perhaps for the sake of some divine plot, he hadn't transformed fully the first time he'd had to use One For Wa…One For All, during the entrance exams, and during the attack on the Unforeseen Simulation Joint, only his affected hand had turned into some sort of flipper.

Now, however?

It was just after his summer tournament match with Todoroki Shouto, whom he'd attempted to fight off long enough to convince him that the power in his left side was his own and not his father's (something the heterochrome fought fiercely for no apparent reason – _you can throw frickin' fireballs! do it!_ ) – but when he'd broken all five fingers on one hand, he'd become a walrus in his entirety.

The good news was that he'd won due to the sudden appearance of incredibly thick, ice-repellant fat and 1900 extra kilograms of weight (putting him at a large specimen of Pacific walrus) as well as some lovely meter-long tusks that had allowed him to chip effortlessly through the ice Todoroki had tried to trap him under and simply body-slam the lightweight out of the ring.

The semifinals had him up against Katsuki Bakugou, who by now had obviously witnessed Izuku's transformation and who had undoubtedly cooked up a plan to defeat him.

What he didn't know was that Walrus-Izuku – Walzuku? Izurus? – _could still use One For All._

He himself hadn't been certain of it, but the mysterious, several-meter hole in the wall (extending through several other dressing rooms) hadn't gotten there by accident. All he'd had to do was channel the power into a body slam, and the reinforced walrus-body had taken the shock for him like a champ.

Part of him almost wanted to _stay_ a walrus.

Hell, maybe he would.

"Alright, you fuckin' _nerd!_ Get out here and – "

"RRRRRRRR"

"What!?"

" _ **On one side of the arena, we have the Blasting Bastard, the Asshole Arsonist, the – "**_

" _What did you just fuckin' call me!?"_

" _ **Bakugou Katsuki!"**_

Present Mic's sonorous voice, amplified by his Quirk, boomed across the stadium, drowning out Bakugou's indignant – no, furious screams.

" _ **And on the other…the Madman Manatee, the Superpowered Seal, the – "**_

"Actually, _Odobenus rosmarus_ is more closely related to the – " the biology hero, Eco, tried to interject, but nobody heard him.

" _ **Midoriya Izuku!"**_

"Hey, where is he?"

"Don't tell me _that's_ him!"

 _Crap,_ Izuku thought. _Now that I'm a walrus, I get to experience firsthand the discrimination against nonhuman species…how does Tokoyami deal with it?_

"I have a human body," Tokoyami Fumikage told Hagakure Tooru, who had just asked the exact same question fifty meters away. "Midoriya has become a walrus in his entirety."

Ignoring the cacophony of boos and jeers aimed his way, Izuku crawled…waddled… _something_ ed his way up to the starting ring on his side, standing…sitting… _something_ ing with his head held high, putting on a brave face for the crowd…insofar as a walrus could make facial expressions beyond _murder._ Opposite him, Bakugou punched the palm of one hand, sending a chain of explosions crackling up his arms, but –

 _I'm not afraid anymore, Kacchan! Because…I'm a walrus now! And my people will_ never _abandon me!_

" _ **Start!"**_

 _God, that's loud._

Without hesitation, Bakugou took off, charging straight at him, but Izuku stood his ground, waddling forward a little to take the impact with absolutely no effect on him whatsoever and turning Bakugou's cocky glare into an expression of utter shock.

"Wha - !?"

" _ **And it seems like Bakugou Katsuki has completely underestimated the inertia of two thousand kilograms of walrus! To absolutely nobody's surprise! Really, how stupid**_ **is** _ **this kid!?"**_

" _Shut up!"_ Bakugou screamed, whipping his head around, but Izuku bumped his leg with the front of a tusk, lurching uncomfortably forward, and his childhood best friend and current rival jumped. "You bastard! You can move!?"

 _Of course I can move! Walruses aren't immobile, you ignoramus!_ – but it came out as incomprehensible grunting, and the crowd started to boo again.

"Get that animal outta here!"

"What's it tryin' to do!? Kill him!? Boo!"

 _Kacchan literally just tried to blow me up, but one grunt and this happens._

"Put 'em down, ref!"

"This is child murder!"

"I'm calling the Geneva Convention!"

" _ **Hey, listeners! The Geneva Convention wasn't made to combat the existence of students-turned-walruses in Japanese high school tournaments! Furthermore, it's**_ **not** _ **something you can call!"**_

"Fine," Bakugou growled, from the arena, and he aimed both palms at Izuku, bracing himself as he screamed: _"Death murder explosion three thousand!"_

With a colossal _bang_ , a wave of lethal heat and force surged forth from the other's hands, and Izuku, even in his walrus form, knew he had to do something…!

 _One For Walrus: Nikolskoye Никольское SMAAAASH!_

His mentor and predecessor typically shouted the names of American states and cities, but as a Pacific Walrus, Izuku felt the need to promote one of the natural homes of his people, the Russian island peninsula of Nikolskoye Никольское, located in the Bering Sea approximately one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight (and one-third) kilometers east-northeast of the focal point of the Sea of Okhotsk, assuming that the Sea of Okhotsk's geographic projection was mapped to a two-dimensional plane and graphed as an asymmetrical ellipse that failed entirely to adhere to Rolle's Law and somehow introduced a variable labeled "b" in the middle of its equation without any sort of context. (It also spilled the coffee of all mathematicians in a three-kilometer radius, causing four cases of second-degree burns.)

Not that anyone could hear him, but _it's the thought that counts!_

With the strength of all Pacific Walruses behind his smash, Izuku was able to not only nullify Bakugou's explosion but counter it entirely and then some, blasting his opponent across the arena into the stands opposite him, where Death Arms caught the falling Bakugou and held him up like a kid who'd just caught one of the many foul balls hit by the Cleveland Indians in 2016.

" _ **And with one hit, Midoriya Izuku uses his Nikolskoye Никольское Smash to SMASH Bakugou Katsuki out of the ring! An incredible victory, and a completely unsurprising one! Really, it's actually unfair, pitting that idiot up against the raw power of a walrus!"**_

Nobody asked how Present Mic knew the name of Izuku's attack; Izuku himself didn't think he wanted to know. They also didn't point out that the "ring" was actually a rectangle, something that had been bothering Geometry Hero: Proof for the entire tournament, to the point where he'd had to purchase a protractor from a nearby vendor to hold onto like a stuffed animal. Just in time, too, because his screaming had really been starting to irk Aizawa, whose telekinetic murder-scarf twitched with bloodlust.

"Hey, you walrus sympathizer! Just who the hell do you think you are?"

" _ **My name's Present Mic! And with just one scream, I could paint the walls red with the blood spouting from your ruptured eardrums!"**_

Before his fellow announcer could make good on this promise, Aizawa erased his Quirk, taking over with a conventional microphone.

" **I am deeply sorry for my colleague's…indiscretion. In fifteen minutes we will be presenting the winners with their awards. Please remain seated…or don't. I can't say I care."**

"Aww, come on, Eraser," Present Mic whined, still de-Quirked. "It's no fun if I don't get to murder at least thirty civilians every year!"

"…How the hell aren't you in prison yet?"

"The legal system! Hey!"

Little did Aizawa – or anyone else, for that matter – know that Present Mic hid a dark secret behind his Quirk.

Tokoyami was perfectly humble during his acceptance of third place, whereas Todoroki received a round of boos and screams from the crowd for his dead silence and utter refusal to acknowledge the way All Might hesitated before awkwardly placing the award on his chest and stepping delicately over to where Bakugou lay (arrogantly mute Bakugou, who received an even worse reception than the stoic Todoroki).

"Midoriya, don't you think it was a little overkill to hit them that hard? They're both still unconscious," Tokoyami pointed out. "As a walrus, your weight and physical strength are both exponentially higher, and – "

"Nonsense! Excessive force in the pursuit of victory is perfectly acceptable!" All Might boomed, before Izuku had a chance to speak, and shot the walrus a wink.

 _That might be why Todoroki and Bakugou aren't saying thank you. I guess you can't really do that when you've been knocked out._

" _ **And now – the moment you've all been waiting for! First place goes to…Midoriya Izuku!"**_ Aizawa, napping, had accidentally allowed Present Mic the use of his Quirk, but to everyone's relief, he hadn't screamed yet.

 _Yet._

"Young Midoriya…you've come so far from the days when you struggled to haul a measly six hundred kilograms!" declared All Might.

 _You literally made a fourteen-year-old haul a refrigerator with a Quirk-empowered grown man on top, but okay, measly._

"I guess you could say you're a real _haul_ rus now!" the number one hero went on, and everyone within earshot rolled their eyes. "No, seriously – I've got some moving to do this weekend, do you think you could - ?"

Izuku grunted angrily. All Might blinked, then apologized and went on. "Anyway! Congratulations on your victory in the Yuuei Academy Summer Sports Festival! We know you'll go on to do great things with your strength, quick thinking, and intelligence!"

He'd just relied on being two thousand kilograms and having a literal superpower to brute-force his way through the last two rounds, so unless the definitions of "quick thinking" and "intelligence" had changed, Izuku thought this was quite a stretch indeed.

Still...despite the jeers, despite the hate, he'd won an overwhelming and decisive victory that day, the walrus champion versus the humans' champion, and hopefully, with this validation of walrus strength, he'd set the first stepping-stone (…waddling-stone?) on the path for a peaceful human-walrus coexistence.

* * *

 **help me**


	2. walrus training

"How the hell are we gonna fit lardass on the bus!?"

"Bakugou! Have some respect! Midoriya-kun is an excellent ally and his weight should not deter this institution from keeping him in hero training!"

"You're only saying that 'cause you both have tails, freakass!"

"Now that's just mean!"

"And lardass wasn't!?"

"Settle down, settle down." Aizawa's yawn wasn't what interrupted them, but rather the sudden erasure of the Quirks of both Bakugou and Ojirou (the latter of whom hadn't even been doing anything other than standing calmly to the side). The explosions up Bakugou's arms ceased, while Ojirou's tail went entirely out of his control and proceeded to rob a nearby convenience store before it was apprehended and brought into the station.

"Aizawa-sensei!" Bakugou fumed, both figuratively and literally. "Are we supposed to let this – this _walrus_ onto the bus!?"

"Yes," the other deadpanned. "We have a wheelchair lift for a reason." He slipped a remote from his pocket, then pressed a button; the back doors of the bus opened, and the wheelchair lift slowly slid out and to the ground, where Izuku crawled onto it and sat patiently as the lift rose and slid right back into the vehicle, the doors closing quietly behind it.

After a deafening silence, the rest of the students started filing onto the bus, leaving a very confused and hurt Bakugou standing on the pavement outside Yuuei for a moment before he realized _shit, I better get on the bus_ and scrambled to make it before the driver took off without him. (The class secretly hoped he would and were disappointed when Bakugou was not abandoned.)

"Hey, Deku-kun?" Uraraka asked him, in the back of the bus.

"Mm?" He could, at least, acknowledge her.

"Why didn't the wheelchair lift break when it tried to pick you up? And why isn't the back of the bus dragging on the ground with your weight?"

 _Grunt._

"We couldn't get to the training camp if that happened," Iida pointed out.

"But that doesn't make any – "

"Yes." And with this cryptic comment, he retrieved an orange from his bag and began to peel it.

* * *

The trip was entirely eventful, though distinctly uncomfortable for Izuku, whose glorious brown-grey mustache had become corrupted by the presence of a distinctly irritating fly that kept landing on the dense bristles.

 _Cut it out, damnit! SMAAASH!_

And with one empowered sneeze, he blew out the front windshield, forcing them to stop at a conveniently placed parking lot on the side of a mountain.

There was something incredibly suspicious about the fact that a pair of thirtysomething women in hero costumes that basically amounted to short skirts and crop tops stood calmly by the front door of the bus, waiting patiently for Izuku to be unloaded; he could still hear them, even if he was a walrus! Still, he gave them the benefit of the doubt – perhaps they didn't want to be rude.

At least, that was what he figured until Aizawa waved and the ground itself decided now would be a good time to escort them down the cliff to the edge of the forest below…except Izuku, who ended up just kind of tumbling down the stony wall like an oversized multi-ton beach ball.

By the time they'd all straightened and brushed themselves off, Mineta – an extremely short child with an equally short grasp of morals, ethics, and general decency – had decided that he had to pee quite badly, to which Izuku grunted in response (one of the perks of being a walrus was the ability to discreetly pee anywhere without judgement…unless of course people knew you were a human, so Izuku naturally did his best to behave like a standard walrus, savaging passerby and accumulating a harem of female walruses all in order to freely urinate on traffic posts – truly, the struggles of privilege).

Much to the collective chagrin of the class, the horrifying dirt-clod monster that showed up to intercept Mineta's bladder did not kill him; his reflexes, honed by years of peeping into dressing rooms and showers, enabled him to escape at lightning speed as easily as if he were evading just another security guard or police officer.

To the class's collective relief, however, Izuku came to their rescue with a powerful Bering Smash, summoning the strength of the northern seas to devastate four linear kilometers of private property, carving a path half a kilometer wide through the trees and obliterating anything within, living or nonliving (amidst the dirt "corpses" of many more "beasts" lay scattered wildlife). Kaminari excitedly referred to this as a "hard carry".

"Deku-kun, do you think maybe that was too much?"

 _No. Like All Might said, it's okay to destroy everything in the pursuit of victory. The government, property owner, or insurance company will pay for any collateral damage, after all._

"That reminds me," Todoroki cut in; where he'd come from, nobody knew. "Since you're causing collateral damage…what happened to controlling your power?"

 _Huh? Oh. Yeah. I'm a walrus now. I don't need to worry about that anymore. Still, sucks I didn't get an internship. One day I'll found my own hero agency, and all walrus-kind will be welcome there!_

"Wait." Iida, this time, who'd long since finished the orange from earlier and was now eating a sixth one ("Where is he getting all these oranges!?" Uraraka cried, traumatized), spoke up. "I thought your dream was to become a hero who saves people with a smile, not to promote the integration of walruses into human society."

 _I can't smile anymore. I don't have lips. Also, as much as I would like to cause societal upheaval and restructure society to a more inclusive form, I think it's best to work in small steps until we get to the point where we can make a major change. I know some of my fellows would disagree, but we're simply not in the position to go making those demands._

"When did you develop telepathy, anyway? And why are you using it to discuss activist principles?"

 _I don't know, but I am literally incapable of not broadcasting my every thought and must carefully police everything I think._

"Um, maybe Mandalay can help you with that one," Uraraka suggested. Nobody asked how she knew the name of a character who hadn't been formally introduced yet; there had been absolutely zero context for why they'd been thrown down a cliff and pointed in the general direction of a mountain.

 _I'd do anything to devour the shit out of some cod right now…oh, crap._

"This is weird," Todoroki observed.

"Yeah, definitely," agreed Uraraka, with a fervent nod.

* * *

The camp was in no way what they'd expected it to be. They'd been told it was a _training camp,_ but not what _kind_ of training; this became immediately apparent when their meal that night was served to them in the form of a one-hectare patch of woods, where they were told to survive off the land.

"The earth provides much more food than you can ever imagine!" Pixie-Bob declared, a Cheshire Cat grin spreading across her face as she popped an entire witchetty grub into her mouth.

"Hey, aren't those native to Australia?" asked Yaoyorozu.

"Yes."

"Why are they here?"

"We're devastating the ecosystem by introducing non-native species for our amusement, rather like Shakespeare enthusiasts corrupted the wilds of North America by introducing the European Starling for the sake of a play."

"Nothing about this is okay."

"Oh, we know." Another grub vanished into that terrifying maw.

 _Did she even chew?_ Izuku thought, forgetting his uncontrollable telepathy in his mortification, and Pixie-Bob shook her head, blonde hair whipping freely.

 _Oh god._

"This is objectively disgusting," Jirou pointed out.

"Hey! Your Quirk is _perfect_ for sounding out worms underground! Oh, she's just like a robin!" Mandalay squealed, and Jirou went white as a sheet.

"Wouldn't Kouda's be better for just telling them to come to come up so we can eat them?" asked Satou, who seemed weirdly on board with the idea.

"No!" Kouda squealed. "I refuse to use my powers to put animals in harm's way!"

"That's why you demanded that a bunch of songbirds 'remove these beasts from the forest', right?" Tokoyami deadpanned. "You pitted a bunch of tiny birds against a monster ten times the size of even Izuku."

"Moving on!" Pixie-Bob interjected, and all eyes found her face again. (Well, most. One pair went back to the hem of her skirt, and _everyone_ knew whose eyes they were.) "You have forty-five minutes to prepare your meal off the land! Now, go!"

" _Hey, you shitrags! You didn't even tell us what the hell we can eat!"_

"Of course not! If you get poisoned, it's your own fault! This is survival of the fittest!" the woman giggled, and everyone paled.

"Fear not!" Iida declared. "I still have my supply of – oh. Right. We left our bags on the bus." Without his oranges, Iida became quite sad indeed.

"Didn't you have your bag still on when you got off? I remember you eating one in the forest," Uraraka told him.

"Don't blame me for continuity errors!"

And so, just like that, the great race to dig up grubs began.


	3. yeeting some plot armour

"Wha…what is…this p-power?"

"RRRRRRRRRRRR"

"Gah!"

And then the meathead before him was sent hurtling into a rock wall at nine hundred kilometers per second.

 _Dare you stand before me!?_ Izuku boomed, mentally, but he knew the other had heard him.

"What are you!? You're no ordinary walrus!"

… _Wait, do you routinely fight walruses?_

"Of course! I'm a real man, and the only way for a real man to get stronger is to fight other real men…or powerful adversaries like walri!"

 _Walri!?_ Had he been saying it wrong the entire time!? Had he been shaming his people!? _Well…thank you for the compliment, both personally and on behalf of my people._ Was it…was it even correct to call walruses his "people"? People were human! But what term could he use!?

Ah, the dilemmas of walrusdom.

Walzuku did not take long to dispose of the villain calling himself Muscular, as well as the entire top of the cliff edge. The kid - Kouta - had vanished at some point, but whether he'd run off or simply been sent flying remained to be seen.

 _Now, why are there villains attacking us?_

Unfortunately, since becoming a Pacific Walrus, Izuku's mental function had declined somewhat – having a brain unadapted to human thought processes was not conducive to having them, and his ability to deconstruct situations, analyze them, and formulate plans of action had been partially replaced with an ability to smash his way through any obstacle with powerful body slams and scrubbing tusk action.

Rumbling his way downhill, Izuku accidentally ended up rolling, slamming into a man with a lizard's head and bandages as well as Mandalay, whose name he still hadn't been told but whose plot armour was so powerful it possessed its own nametag.

"Watch where you're going!" the Pussycat hissed, and Izuku instinctively bowed, though considering he was still rolling across the grass with the lizard-man clasped firmly between his front flippers, it did nothing but send a sharp pain up his neck that would have exacerbated any existing spinal damage. Luckily, none of this was present, and half of the previous sentence was insignificant filler content designed to fluff out the story's word count.

"Watch where you're going!" Mandalay hissed again, this time at the above paragraph. It had already broken the fourth wall and was veering dangerously close to leaping out of the hole entirely.

With a mighty grunt, Izuku heaved the scale-covered man into a tree, or more accurately through several trees, but thanks to his own special brand of plot armour, Spinner was merely rendered unconscious instead of being instantly snapped in half by several dozen times the force of gravity.

 _Huh. I wonder where my plot armour went?_

"Oh, shit." He turned to see Mandalay watching him, concerned, and tried to give her a thumbs-up, but this was impossible. He had no thumbs. "You're gonna want to get some new plot armour, Midoriya. What happened to your old set?"

 _I guess I outgrew it when I turned into a walrus._

Mandalay snapped her fingers. "Ah. That might explain it. There's a dwarven smith hidden somewhere on this property, if one of your Bering Smashes didn't completely obliterate his workshop."

 _Sorry about those._

"It's fine," she sighed, rolling her eyes. "Just…stick to the Nikolskoye Никольское Smash from now on, 'kay?"

 _Got it. Where can I find this blacksmith?_ Izuku projected, and Mandalay pointed north to a mountain that absolutely had not been there several seconds prior.

"Mount Ironheart. He lives in a shop located somewhere around the mountain's midpoint. You'll have to climb, but if you can make it before dawn, you should be back in time to safely progress the plot."

 _Got it! Thanks, Mandalay-sensei!_

"Please don't call me that. I feel old."

 _At least she's not Pixie-Bob,_ he thought bitterly, but –

"I heard that!"

 _Sorry, sorry! I'll just be going now._

* * *

As it turned out, Mount Ironheart was comprised largely of silt, clay and basalt rock, and the supposed "heart of iron" was actually a colossal vein of some sort of naturally-occurring ferrosteel and not raw iron ore.

"So," the dwarf, named Sven (he was actually from New York, but his parents were self-identifying "Iceaboos", a horrific portmanteaux of "Iceland" and "weeaboo", and named him the most basic thing possible – rather like an actual weeaboo would name their child "Yuki", or an "Ireaboo" would name their child "Liam" and be promptly disappointed by a subsequent wave of Liam Neeson namealikes several years later) told him, "you want me to craft you a new suit of plot armour?"

 _Ah, yes, sir. How much?_

"Free! We're buddies, yeah? You ran a fetch quest for me, I'll love you forever."

 _I literally walked…er, waddled ten feet to fetch a mysteriously detached chunk of "Mountain's Heart Ore" that was just lying on the ground and brought it back to you. That's like offering someone room and board because they fetched you a spoon._

"Hahaha!" cackled Sven, in the ancient tongue of NPC. "That's the spirit. You just hold tight and I'll have this ready in just a minute."

And he paced over to his forge, utterly oblivious to Izuku's baffled stare. Then again, he hadn't even seemed to notice that Izuku was a literal walrus, so perhaps Sven was not the most perceptive.

* * *

Barreling back into the nonexistent fray in his gleaming new breastplate, Izuku stood proudly before the two remaining Pussycats; Pixie-Bob's helmet had saved her a skull-crushing at the hands of a – man? but Izuku swore he'd heard the lizard-man call them "sis" – and Ragdoll was nowhere to be found, though as she hadn't worn protection, she was most likely dead, or being played with by some hapless redheaded child.

"Holy shit. That took you long enough."

 _The quest was long and arduous._

"Please stop talking like that."

Just then, there was a colossal crash from 24.8 meters off (just how anyone could measure so accurately escaped the realm of plausible explanation and careened off into Saturn, crashing through the gas giant before becoming caught in its orbit and returning to collide with the solid core, completely obliterating the entirety of Saturn and leaving Uranus as the only ringed planet [with the possible exception of Neptune, which a simple Google search could have verified if only _someone_ wasn't too lazy to type "Neptune" into the search bar], much to the dismay of intergalactic stain removal salesmen – "ring around the planet? not anymore!" – only there was no longer a planet, and nobody with a cosmic bottle of Shout! was willing to say that they'd clean _just_ Uranus with it – but where is this aside going? why is it demonstrating the maturity of humour that one would expect from a nine year old?) and a massive black claw sliced through the forest, causing roughly as much damage as one of Izuku's Bering Smashes. The source was none other than a pitch-black monstrosity the size of several school buses, which had in its clutches none other than –

 _Tokoyami-kun!_

Before anyone else could act, however, a pair of high pitched screams raced into the clearing before their owners; ignoring their disloyal screams, which _clearly_ didn't care enough to stick around 'til the bitter end and were content to leave their owners die, Yaoyorozu and a side character who wouldn't appear again for at least six more arcs but whose Quirk was conveniently suited to his intended purpose – Izuku was pretty sure his name was Archie – rushed after the piercing sounds, deciding that Dark Shadow was less dangerous than the _other_ bird-faced hulk of a creature currently pursuing them. Upon closer inspection, Izuku noted that it had a chainsaw for an arm, with the other arm weighed down by an entire lawnmower – an inefficient adaptation, but certainly one he'd write down in his hero notebooks later. (Or he would, if he had hands.)

" _How the fuck has nobody come to help us yet!?"_ Yaoyorozu shrieked, but as she and Akemi sprinted for their lives, the thing – which Izuku dimly recognized as a Noumu, from the USJ incident, before he'd gone full walrus – stopped dead, revving down the power tools sprouting from what were likely its arms at some point.

It was staring directly at Dark Shadow, who paused in its destructive rampage to survey the Noumu.

"…Cuuute…"

Everyone in the clearing, including Dark Shadow, was rendered speechless. (Yaoyorozu and Arby's had already fled.) _What the fuck?_ ran through all of their minds, including Dark Shadow's.

" _ **Excuse me?"**_ the behemoth rumbled, and Tokoyami struggled feebly.

("Please put me down." He was ignored.)

"You…cute."

The weed-eater that had taken the place of one of its left arms twitched excitably, and the Noumu staggered a step towards Dark Shadow, who recoiled somewhat.

" _ **Yeah, no, I don't think so. Can we not do this?"**_

"Me…want…date?"

 _Why does it sound confused on whether or not it wants a date?_

"You're asking me?" Mandalay quipped. "I couldn't figure out whether or not _I_ wanted a date until I was twenty-seven, and then it was just a dried apricot."

 _I can't tell if that's an innuendo or not._

"For a dehydrated fruit, he was very polite, but I just couldn't deal with it in the bedroom."

 _ENOUGH!_ If walri could blush, Izuku would be burning up.

" _ **Me**_ **no** _ **want date."**_

"But…me…flowers?" And the Noumu lunged for a nearby bush with a pair of gardening shears, pruning off a makeshift bouquet with remarkable skill. "Call…Edward."

" _ **Robert Pattinson has been dead for a century and a half. I appreciate the thought, but I just couldn't do it with that hedge trimmer you've got going on."**_

There was no innuendo here, either – one of the Noumu's limbs was an electric hedge trimmer, despite it already having four described limbs.

" _ **It's….unsettling, okay? I'm sorry."**_

Something twitched in the Noumu's face, and it revved up a pizza cutter. Raised the appendage.

"You…just like everyone else! Me thought you were different!"

" _ **Please calm down. We can talk this out – "**_ The dark titan attempted to placate the Noumu, which had started to shred the flowers with a pair of nail clippers, tears trailing down its green-skinned face.

"No! Me tired of this!"

And, with a resounding cry, it barreled towards Dark Shadow, who began to back away into the forest before turning in a full-on run (or as close as an incorporeal shadow could get to a run). Thinking quickly, Izuku rushed to save Tokoyami –

 _N-Noumu-kun! B-baka!_

The Noumu stopped dead once more, letting the pressure cooker on its back simmer down.

"Fish?"

 _No, I'm not a fish. I'm a walrus. I...I understand how you feel. Being different! Nobody wants me, either. I'm – I'm not like the other students at Yuuei. You…you have to understand that you're not alone! That –_

 _ **Bang.**_

The Noumu collapsed, spouting blood from a hole in its head, and everyone turned to see Sven the dwarf brandishing a revolver.

" _Did someone call for a smith? A gunsmith, that is!"_

"No, nobody called for a fucking gunsmith!" Mandalay screamed. "We were about to have a heart-to-heart and _you fucking shot it!_ "

"…Oh. Uh, sorry," the dwarf mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck, but Mandalay just shrugged, as did Izuku.

 _Eh. He was a horrifying monster with no brain, anyway. There's no changing something like that._

"I would like to object," Spinner pointed out, limping out of the trees. "He has a brain. Look, it's literally sticking out of his skull."

 _Look, you know what I mean. Anyway, that speech_ was _from the heart, but I find that as a walrus, I have significantly less of a heart. All that matters to me now is protecting my harem._

"Isn't that elephant seals?" Mandalay asked, to which Walzuku only responded with an incredibly grave stare.

 _I'm gonna go find Tokoyami and Dark Shadow. They probably need someone to comfort them in their time of need._

"Didn't you just say you only cared about protecting your harem?"

Another grave stare, and Mandalay clapped a hand to her mouth.

Izuku waddled off into the trees and was swallowed up by the darkness – both of night, and that in his walrussy four-chambered heart.


End file.
